The Mumbai-based artist's new show reveals his fixation with closing the distance between order and disorder, myth and time, the conceptual and gestural

Photo Caption | Jitish Kallat's new show, titled ‘Phase Transition’ that opens at Galerie Templon in Paris on January 12, once again reveals his fixation with closing the distance between order and disorder, myth and time, and the conceptual and gestural | Featured: Detail of a Palindrome Anagram Painting, acrylic, gesso, lacquer, charcoal, watercolour pencil on linen, 8x6 feet

Renowned for his large-scale sculptures and mainly new media forays evoking irony-filled images of history, science, time and space reclaimed from the wide blue years of yonder, Jitish Kallat has deservedly earned a spot among the art world’s most remarkable minds. The 44-year-old Mumbai-based artist’s ability to straddle the worlds of high art with a constant engagement with the spectacle of every day objects (for example, his 2009 ‘The Cry of the Gland’ zoomed in on the stained shirt pockets from his encounters with ordinary people on the streets), not to mention his knack for unusual subject matter and even more unusual ways of telling that story, has made him one of the most influential contemporary artistic voices in India.

Phase Transition

Kallat’s new show, titled ‘Phase Transition’ that opened at Galerie Templon, Paris on January 12, once again reveals his fixation with closing the distance between order and disorder, myth and time, and the conceptual and gestural. If you find references to his own work in the current exhibition, Kallat is quick to point out that there may be remnants of “earlier discarded paintings,” suggesting a continuity of themes that any artist returns to time and again.

Flotsam of Gestural Abstraction

“The ideas enshrined in the exhibition have been long standing inquiries but directed through a deeply probing and speculative painterly process,” he tells AD, adding that he’s been working on these suite of paintings for several months. “I followed the impulses as they emerged from the canvases, letting a mark or a stain direct the course of the next gesture. From a flotsam of gestural abstraction, forms begin to coalesce; I sometimes feel as if the works are giving vent to and materialising a dormant archive of silent observations – evocations of the bodily, the botanical, the sub-oceanic, and the intergalactic—all intermingle and exchange energies. How does one think about emergence, evolution and entropy, perhaps the controlled environment of a painting within which forces of change and transformation can be slowed or expedited, where pigment can be deployed to extract imagery from places, remote in space and time.”

Return to Painting

Kallat, who’s adept at hopping between collage, photography and installation, last painted a canvas in 2012. The creative process behind these paintings, titled Palindrome/ Anagram Paintings and the drawings as part of ‘Phase Transition,’ took the artist by surprise. He says the title, ‘Palindrome/ Anagram Paintings,’ was prompted “to a great extent by the manner in which I saw myself paint.” He explains, “On various occasions I felt that the paintings were returning my gaze, not always in a single orientation. I would paint them facing up or down, or flat on the ground, and each orientation would exert different forces on the work, altering its course and its meaning. By calling it a Palindrome, I subtly point to its internal symmetry wherein you could read it from any direction.” While painting, on several occasions, he recalls, “I was reminded of the uniformity of the sphere where it is hard to agree upon which is the ‘top’ side of a sphere.”

Doomsday Device

Those familiar with Kallat’s art know that the location and the meaning that a site brings to site-specific works is half the story. Thus, the whimsical idea of the seating within the gallery space of Templon that has been altered by Kallat to mirror the shape of the two hands of the Doomsday Clock, a conceptual clock maintained and updated annually by members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board since 1947. Reflecting on the idea, Kallat explains, “The Doomsday Clock has been an image of great interest to me over the last few years. I find it interesting that scientists who normally have to advance propositions that are experimentally falsifiable, in the case of the Doomsday Clock, advance an image that is totally symbolic as if they were speaking through the discipline of art.”

The symbolic clock represents “a hypothetical human-made global catastrophe as midnight and the Bulletin’s opinion on how close the world is to a global calamity as a number of ‘minutes’ to midnight. Its original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. Since then it has annually been set backward and forward 23 times. As of January 2018, the clock is set at ‘two minutes to midnight’ due mainly to nuclear threats, climate change, bioterrorism, and artificial intelligence.”

Play of Multiple Forces

Kallat’s artistic recipe reads like this: they combine many of his preoccupations like cosmos or transience and glue it all together into a complex maze of ideas that a discerning viewer can enjoy unpicking. So, whether it’s the images of rotis that look like lunar landscapes, or a picture (a selfie?) of the artist making a phone call, sleeping dogs, six sunrises or historical speeches used as perhaps social commentary, Jitish Kallat’s art challenges the mind. His intent, as he has always insisted, is to understand the world through his informed prism.

“In a desire to better understand the world and to harness an expanded ecology of signs one wanders into the past to cite a document or an utterance, one ponders on fruit-skins or wind patterns. Of course these leaps that my work take in time and space do get interpreted as engagements with history or cosmology,” says Jitish, adding, “The focal length at which one sees the world often defines the meaning we derive from it. To look at our worldly, earthly, human stories alongside a fleeting pointer to the unfathomable scale of our universe, expanding at an inexplicable pace, can bring an expanded dimension of insight into the stories we tell ourselves.”

Phase Transition is on at Galerie Templon, Paris until March 9, 2019 at 28 Rue Grenier Saint Lazare.